(R)Egress
by The Exile
Summary: Tokyo Jungle headcanon/speculation with endgame spoilers. Memory Log 8: 'Our plan has failed catastrophically. We can no longer undo what we have done. The transfer process must be stopped before we doom our own time period as well as the past...'


**Memory Log 8**

Our plan has failed catastrophically. We can no longer undo what we have done. The transfer process must be stopped before we doom our own time period as well as the past... unless we've already managed to irreversibly damage the flow of time itself with our meddling. There was a time when we would have considered that maybe the things that started going badly wrong were always scheduled to happen, that we ourselves caused our own doom by causing such severe overcrowding, by destabilising an entire human civilisation, but now... now it's gone beyond even that.

Our biggest mistake was to think that we could pull off something like this unnoticed. Even if we had succeeded, how were we supposed to stop the displaced population from immediately questioning everything around them, from eventually finding our base and working out how the process can be reversed? They probably wouldn't have chosen diplomacy when they did eventually find us again. I mean, they're us. A few hundred years of history to catch up on doesn't make them naive, innocent victims. In fact, it might possibly make them worse. For all our flaws, at least there's a certain savagery we had time to get out of our systems. We know all about that now, I guess.

As it stands, something much worse happened. Our transfer worked perfectly to get us here - well, some of us, a lot of us died more horribly than I really want to think about - but once it came to sending the population of 2027 back to our own time period, the signal was blocked at the other end. Not just failed, was deliberately blocked. I'm sure of it now. Maybe even the Transport AIs don't want us back.

Anyway, the inevitable happens when you dramatically expand the size of a population with complete strangers who treat you like children and try to screw with your entire society. We were probably lucky that not all of us made it back, in a way. We were overcrowded to begin with, and more than doubling the population would probably have caused a riot that wiped all of us out right there and then. As it stands, we were found out almost immediately. Turns out they had pretty good surveillance systems even then. It didn't take them long to work out how we had gotten here, even though they were resistant to the idea of time travel except for some Government agencies who had already figured us out before we even came here. Did anyone even check the history books before they planned all this, by the way, or did they really just assume we would know better than them? In any case, there was panic once it became public. There are no immigration laws protecting time travellers, funnily enough, and the Government was taking a hard stance against illegal immigrants as it was, especially those with hostile intent. Saving the future isn't a valid excuse, apparently, if you're going to sacrifice the present to do so. There was violent rioting and the Government didn't really care what happened to us in it. Our leaders were put on trial and executed except for the ones of us who managed to seal ourselves into the bunker. (The one good thing that came out of this - I'm Director now, and I get to be the one who writes these things.) There wasn't much we could do down here except try again and again to get the other side of the transfer working.

The ironic thing is, there weren't all that many of us left to account for the transfer, so we wouldn't even have to send that many back. Maybe a city block or two.

The destabilisation of society didn't stop with trying to kill us. A panicked population, suddenly exposed to several realities they weren't mentally prepared for, turned against their Government for hiding the truth from them. Armageddon cults popped up everywhere (to be fair, they were right). The military seized what technology of ours they could find and tried to build weapons out of it, some of it being stolen by even less scrupulous organisations in the process. Now the same technology that had caused us so much trouble through its overuse was in the hands of people who didn't even understand it and assumed it was meant to be destructive. (Why the hell had we taken it back with us in the first place? Shouldn't we just have left everything behind that we didn't need for the transfer?)

It was also paradoxical for it to exist. The discoveries hadn't been made, the supporting power networks hadn't been developed. They were being reverse engineered from us, but who was supposed to have developed it first? This wasn't the only bad thing we had done to the timeline. The very fact that time still flowed for us, that our own timelines continued, was probably causing a lot of problems. And then some of us had managed to sleep around with the people of 2027 because of course it was the first thing that happened, despite it being the most important lesson drummed into us again and again, and now we were probably our own grandfathers.

It didn't cause too many problems - at first - but it was always in the back of our minds as we desperately tried to get the transfer back up and running, get any signal whatsoever back from 2215. Outside, society was still collapsing at a rate that we knew from experience it couldn't be brought back from. Too many disasters had happened at once. It was the perfect textbook cultural death spiral.

But that wasn't even the really bad news...

It's actually quite difficult to tell apart pre-hominids from a human society gone very savage due to extremes of displacement and shock - in terms of behaviour, that is, it's kinda easy to see that one is covered in fur and still looks and moves a lot more like an ape than a human. Their vocal chords had retro-evolved as well, and presumably their brains. There was a huge difference between early humans who were working to evolve into the people we know today (not sure if that was such a good idea, looking back on it) and a new type of Homo Erectus that was slowly regressing even further but still had some knowledge and technology from its previous evolutionary state, knew full well that its environment was completely screwed and had retained some of the extremes of modern society, but amplified ten times worse when combined with primal savagery.

It wasn't pretty, the noises we heard outside. What's worst of all, sometimes it sounds like they're very close when they thump around, like they're banging on our vault door with that insane strength of theirs.

A pack of prehistoric humans can't get through a nuke-proof blast door, right?

 **Memory Log 9**

We finally got a signal back from the Transport AI units but they didn't complete the transfer when we sent the instruction. The alarms are going off and there was a damage report from the overseer. What the hell is going on back there?

... What the heck, I'm not sure we deserve to succeed at this rate. We can't survive here, even if we get rid of these monsters we created, and it sounds like we might not want to go back even if we could. Whatever's going on back there, I hope they sort it out better than we tried to sort out our own lives. It wasn't like we didn't have other options at that point. If we could develop time travel, we could develop greener technology. We could even send that technology back with a warning about our fate, maybe some photos. Heck, we could have migrated to our space colonies, maybe tried harder to recycle all the junk up there. But no, we had to use the least logical and most destructive plan we possibly could to not only ourselves but maybe the entire timeline of our species.

There are more of them out there now. I'm not sure where they're coming from. There weren't that many humans and they can't be mating that fast. I think we set off a chain reaction in another time period somewhere. Anyway, we're running out of food down here and they never stop battering against the front door, hard enough to make a dent against it now.

... I wonder if they're edible?


End file.
